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Craft, Real parenting and general ramblings

breastfeeding

For the last 2 weeks I’ve been gradually weaning Little Man from breastfeeding to bottle feeding between 8am and 6pm in preparation for him starting nursery on Monday (Yikes!).

Week 1 was the morning bottle. LM will have a breastfeed first thing when we wake, then a bottle of formula milk around 4 hours later. This has worked out ok. He only takes around 2 ounces of milk, but as my boobs don’t have a gauge perhaps he only drank this much from me.

4 hours after the morning bottle he’d have a breastfeed and then a breastfeed at bedtime. I also breastfeed if he wakes overnight.

Week 2 was the afternoon bottle. LM started to have the afternoon feed as formula instead of breast.

It’s been emotional for me. I’ve learnt that:

1. Formula milk is expensive. I paid £11 for a tub of Aptamil milk. Breast milk was free!

2. Bottle feeding is fiddly; I have to sterilise, make up bottles, wash up…

3. Bottle feeding takes preparation. If I go out I only had to remember my boobs when breastfeeding.

4. LM likes his milk cool! But he loves the boob… men are strange.

5. I miss the snuggles during the day. I don’t get the same closeness when bottle feeding.

6. My body has adjusted ridiculously well. I only begin to feel engorged right before the bedtime feed.

7. My NatureBond breast pump is brilliant. During the night feeds I squeeze it on to the boob I’m not feeding from and it catches excess milk. This saves me expressing for LMs cereal in the morning.

8. Hubby still doesn’t help with the feeding during his days off. Even though he can now make the bottle and feed LM without my in put.

9. It has taken trying 5 different bottle brands to find one LM likes. He’s chosen Nuk. German engineering in a baby bottle… both Hubby and I work for German companies. It’s taken over our lives.

10. The Perfect Prep was worth £60! I hit the roof when hubby bought it as it’s a lot of money. It does make a bottle in 2 minutes though without me needing to measure out water or worry about temperature.

I’m still breastfeeding first thing, bedtime and overnight. I’m happy to keep going with this for as long as LM wants. I love the ease of breastfeeding and the bond.

My Little Man will be starting nursery 4 days a week when I return to work in 4 weeks time. As a result he’ll need to be able to drink formula milk from a bottle as I won’t have time to express enough milk to send to nursery with him.
I’ve exclusively breast fed him for the first 8 months of his life. I’m super proud of this achievement and sad that I’ll need to reduce this bonding time. Due to being exclusively breastfed he isn’t keen on taking a bottle.
We’ve so far tried 4 different brands of bottle and 5 different bottles before we’ve finally found one which he accepted. I’ll review these in a later post.
We’ve also tried 2 brands of formula! He flat out rejected the Cow & Gate stage 2 formula, so we tried the Aptimil Follow on Milk, he’s accepted this on the second try.
I’ve decided to try and get him used to Formula on the bedtime feed first as this is the only feed where my husband is consistently home to help. It’s taken 3 bedtimes before LM has taken the bottle and then gone to sleep. For the next few weeks we’ll continue this.
After a week or so I’ll try to swap his morning nap feed for formula and continue this for a week or so to allow my milk supply to adjust and to enable LM to get used to it.
After a week of that I’ll do the same with his afternoon feed.
After this, all being well I’ll pick back up the bedtime feed and swap his early evening feed. The reason for this is that I’d still like to feed my Little Man but I think this will be limited to his wake up, bedtime and night feeds.
I’m hoping that my body will adjust! I’ll keep the blog updated with my progress.

I went out for the evening to the cinema, leaving Daddy in charge of bedtime for the first time ever.
I got home 2 hours after little man should have been asleep to find that he’s refused the formula milk Daddy made and has refused to go to sleep. Daddy I’d rather stressed and has now gone out on the hunt for ice cream.
LM has been pretty much exclusively Breastfed but has taken Formula Milk when offered it at the Grandparents. Perhaps it’s the brand we’ve bought (Cow & Gate) or perhaps it’s that we’re using medium flow tests and should be using Fast Flow now?
Whatever the problem, we’ll have to experiment until we find a fix. Either way, I now feel like my Little Man does love me!

I usually write a blog post, or at least a draft of it, whilst doing a night feed. However for the last 4 nights my Little Man hasn’t woken up for a night feed.

I’m super pleased and feeling a little more energised than I have in a long time but I now feel neglectful of my little blog which has become a mental Baby for me. Like a little outlet of my mind palace – yes! I am a Sherlock fan.

This week I haven’t managed to do much in the way of being creative, but, I have spent a lot of time rolling around on the floor with my son. He’s discovered my ears and apparently these are the most fun things to eat.

I will need to find another time when I have relative peace to blurt the contents of my mind into my phone and therefor out onto the interweb for everyone to read. Yes – I’m aware that it’s called internet, not interweb. When your day job involves training people on how said internet works and DNS protocol you never want to see, hear or write the work internet again.